


Both Doors

by Celia_and



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Did I mention ambiguous/open ending, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Fuckbuddies, Gratitude Kink, Hopeful Ending, In my mind this is set in maybe the 90’s but there’s nothing to indicate that in the story, Lingerie, Missionary Position, Naked Male Clothed Female, No A/C, Not somnophilia but waking someone up for sex, One Shot, Please don’t read unless you’re okay with an ambiguous/open ending, Sleeping Together, Sleepy Sex, Smut, Soft Ben Solo, Spooning, Summer, Unsafe Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:48:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28484883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Celia_and/pseuds/Celia_and
Summary: “Who are you?” she asks him sometimes, when they lie in side-by-side darkness after doing that thing that remakes the world.  “What have you done?”He doesn’t answer. She doesn’t want him to.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 42
Kudos: 443





	Both Doors

**Author's Note:**

  * For [midnightmorningcoffee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/midnightmorningcoffee/gifts).



> I’m gifting this to midnightmorningcoffee even though they don’t know me because I read [An Animal’s Grace](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25944424) yesterday and the vibes were exquisite and got my brain juices flowing to write this. Thanks. 💛

He arrives late at night, as she knew he might.

She’d tried to stay up for him. She’d put on the blue silk negligee that she knows is his favorite even though he’s never told her. (He doesn’t talk much. Neither does she, with him. They don’t need many words.) It’s an enigma of a blue—it passed cobalt but didn’t quite make it all the way to navy, with a minor detour to pick up the slightest hint of green.

Around midnight her six a.m. alarm starts tugging on her eyelids, but when she gets in bed she leaves her bedroom doors open for him. It’s one of the opulent quirks out of place in this old, run-down apartment: the set of French doors inlaid with panes of glass, that you can open grandly like a realtor welcoming her young-married-couple clients to this latest house. _You made it! Isn’t this a divine location?_ Why do you need two doors? One is plenty. She opens them both anyway. For him.

The night is warm enough that she doesn’t need a sheet. Teetering on the edge of hot, really, but she prefers the rich mouthful of summer to the metallic tang of the artificial cold, so when the old window unit stopped working she detached it from the window frame and left it on the fire escape to rust.

She leaves her body for him to find. Lying on her side, with her bottom leg pointed out to the doors that he’ll come through if he comes, and the other bent in front of her. A snapshot of a can-can dancer, frozen in time and space. Mostly time.

 _(Who are you?_ she asks him sometimes, when they lie in side-by-side darkness after doing that thing that remakes the world. _What have you done?_

He doesn’t answer. She doesn’t want him to.)

It took her a long time to get used to his body. She’s still not used to it, really. Her hands know the plane of his back and her ears know the soft grunts that he makes when he can’t help it, but every time he lies on top of her she’s not prepared. She couldn’t possibly be prepared, for how big he is. It’s like the memory of pain: you can remember _ah yes. A shooting discomfort, or a dull one. Like your muscles are being squeezed, or stabbed, or burned. That’s pain._ But it’s purely a theoretical exercise until you feel it again. The memory of pain can’t compare to pain. The memory of him can’t compare to him.

She works an early shift and he works a late one, so it’s often this way: her halfway to sleep and him letting himself in with the key she gave him once, pressed silent and uncharacteristically bashful into his palm, saying without words _I hope you like doing this, with me. I hope you like it enough to keep doing it. Because the crown molding is crumbling and whenever I undress I leave my dirty clothes where they fall, but it’s not the apartment you come here to see, is it. It’s me. And if I give you a key I don’t have to get up when you knock on the door, so quietly that I always think it’s probably for one of the neighbors instead. I can go to bed and leave the bedroom doors open—both of them—and you can wake me up and fuck me._

He does.

He always smells of sweat when he arrives. She doesn’t know how much of it is from his day, and how much of it he made hurrying from work to get to her. She can’t quite imagine him hurrying, but she likes to try. Those legs were made for loping, for setting a long, easy pace that most anyone else would have to hurry to keep up with. That was the first thing she noticed about him: his height. Whoever designed him had some extra inches lying around, and they didn’t hold onto them for the next person. They gave those spare inches to him, so he has more than he really needs, but it isn’t about _need,_ what they do together in her bed with his long, tall, big body.

(Well maybe it is, a little.)

He always undresses before he crawls in beside her. They learned that the hard way, early on, because once he first touches her he can’t stop for long enough to take his clothes off. He would growl in frustration at the fabric between them and she would laugh and help him—help him unbuckle his belt and yank it free of its loops and unbutton his pants and unzip his zipper and push it all down along with his briefs to his knees, where it would jiggle and strain and watch as he thrusted.

 _It’s silly, if you think about it,_ she told him once. _We’re really just rubbing our bodies together. We’re going to all this trouble and expending all this energy and it doesn’t even get us anywhere. Evolution messed up. Darwin should’ve planned it better._

(Somehow he knew, even from the very beginning when he didn’t have any reason to know, that she was kidding when she said things like that. She knew Darwin didn’t design evolution. But she was a stranger to him. A young woman he’d never met before. She could’ve dropped out of school. She could’ve been homeschooled by adamantly creationist religious parents. She could very well have lacked a grasp on the concepts of evolutionary biology. But she didn’t. And he knew, from the first time he saw her.)

 _It does,_ he’d answered.

_Does what?_

_Does get us somewhere._

She’d chortled reluctantly at that, and rolled toward him and kissed his shoulder like she’d invented kissing. And he’d put a finger in her wet, puffy, used cunt that Darwin had made for him. Not to finger her. Just to keep inside. Because he could. He hadn’t taken it out until she’d made a prune of him, and then he stroked a line down her chin with his bumpy, pruney skin. To show her what she’d done to him. And because he could.

He feels guilty when she’s already asleep when he arrives, she’s almost certain. Guilty about waking her up. Trading her sleep for his pleasure. But she thinks he might secretly like it: coming into her bedroom and avoiding clothes on carpet to get to her and finding her already asleep. That’s how much she trusts him—to give him her key and her unconsciousness. He could stand there and watch her sleep for a while before he undresses and crawls in with her. She sometimes wonders if he does. If he does, it’s secret, and if he likes it, that’s secret too. Not in an exclusionary way. Not the two kids on the playground making eye contact with you as one cups their hand to whisper in the other’s ear, so you know it’s about you, what they’re saying, and it’s mean.

 _Mean._ It’s a baby word, a word that resides in the province of children. No adult would call another adult mean, or if they did, it would be in the other sense of the word: the one that means ungenerous. Stingy. Because for grownups, things are about money.

He’s not mean, her Ben. He’s the opposite of mean. Both kinds. (She thinks of him playfully as _her_ Ben. She doesn’t think he would mind, if he knew.) He’s nice. _Be nice._ It’s a small word, just as small as mean, but you would have to use probably fifty-seven letters at least to begin to define everything it fits into its four. Like _mean._ If you asked a child what nice meant, or mean, they would just look at you confused. _A nice person is nice. Everybody knows._ Ben is nice.

He’s generous, too. He apologizes when he cums. Like he’s just here for her pleasure. Like he’s not supposed to be getting something out of this too—this senseless rubbing. She has to hold him and whisper how much she likes it. And she does.

She likes it when she’s on her back beneath him and his peak sneaks up on him, crinkles his brow and parts his mouth in a gasp of utter surprise. It never occurs to him that he’s going to cum until about a second before he does: so wrapped up is he in her. Even though she can’t see his face this way, she likes it when he takes her from behind, kneeling and pulling her sleepy bottom up on knees to meet him, or with her flat on her belly and her negligee pushed up around her waist and him astride. Her ass fascinates him. Sometimes he forgets to thrust, so busy is he with stroking and kneading and gently cupping, and she has to wiggle and bend her knee to bring her bare foot up to his bare back to spur him on. It’s a gamble, though, because sometimes the ball of her foot is a new distraction, and he leans back into it and lets her massage his lower back with her feet. It’s the sort of thing they could do when he’s not fucking her, except that when he can be fucking her he should. It’s quite a conundrum.

 _Do you mind?_ she’d asked him once, tucked under his arm. _Doing all the work?_

He hadn’t answered for a long time, long enough that she’d crawled up onto his chest so she could see his face. His brow was furrowed. He kept on opening his mouth and then shutting it again, like he was trying to find words adequate to express whatever tangle of thought or feeling was writhing in his head or in his chest.

 _No._ He’d touched the place where her left dimple pops out when she smiles. _No, Rey, I don’t mind._

* * *

She’s only half asleep when he enters the room, or maybe three quarters. She dimly registers the rustle of fabric as he undresses, but she doesn’t stir, even when he comes to lie behind her with his front pressed to her back. She hums sleepily when his arm snakes around her midsection and he brushes her hair aside to kiss the side of her neck.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” she smiles.

“I should let you sleep.”

“You shouldn’t.”

His cock is already mostly hard, stroking the inside of her thigh, dipping beneath the hem of her negligee.

“Want you,” she murmurs.

That’s all he was waiting for and she knows it. Because his hand is sliding up to her hip, pushing up the enigma-blue silk, and it’s clutching the bone there and his hips have started a rhythm that rubs his cock through her folds, like they haven’t gotten the message that he’s not inside her yet.

He’s always a little surprised to find her wet. She doesn’t tell him that she rubs herself not quite to orgasm before she turns off the light, because she likes him to think that it’s all because of him: that these twenty seconds of skin and greetings and kisses are enough to make her as wet as he always finds her. She wonders sometimes if it’s wrong: this small, silent lie she tells him. But she can’t bring herself to regret it, not when he makes a soft grunt of wonder every time he finds her wet and ready.

“Want you,” she whines again, and grinds her ass feebly against him.

“Thank you,” he whispers, so softly that she almost doesn’t hear. “Thank you,” he repeats as he presses the hot, blunt tip of him into her, and _yes,_ she likes this, she likes this very much, his gratitude and his lips and his cock and his sweat and his size and the way she can just lie here—lie still and let him give her what he takes.

 _Making love,_ they call it: the people whose job it is to put words together into meanings. She doesn’t know about love, but it does feel like they’re making something, sometimes. There are moments of him and her together that feel like more than just him, and her. The gasping, mysterious thing the two of them are is more than the sum of its parts.

“Ben,” she whispers shakily. His hand is on her now, tucked under her bent leg, rubbing diligently away at the place that he knows will make her die a little and come back to life.

“Thank you,” he grunts between breaths as he fucks her.

 _Why are you thanking me?_ she wants to ask, but words are hard now, because his fingers have quickened, so she needs to cry out and grab his wrist and arch backward into him and let him tear her into cells so he can put her back together.

When she finds the earth again, he’s stilled. She clenches weakly and finds him still hard inside her.

She strokes his arm. “Why’d you stop?”

He takes his time in answering. “I don’t know.” He holds her to him. “Want it to last.”

She laces her fingers through his, threading through the gaps that make a place for her. “Want you to cum.”

He kisses her ear and gently slides his cock out of her. “Sleep now.”

She could sleep, easily. She could yield to the tug on her eyelids and let him climb of the bed and get dressed and when her alarm rang she would be alone in sweaty sheets and wrinkled silk. “No.”

She scoots forward, away from him, so she can roll onto her back and turn her head to look at him.

“It’s not just for me,” she says to the summer night. “It’s not an— an _inconvenience._ You don’t need to thank me. I would rather be with you than sleep.” She pulls him insistently on top of her, so he lies cradled in the circle of her hips. She brushes his lips with hers. Not even a kiss. “I would rather be with you than sleep.”

He’s still hesitant, uncertain, like it’s too much all at once. Too many words for their quiet nights. So it’s she who reaches down between them and takes his cock in her hand and coaxes it back with fisting strokes to its full hardness and guides it to her cunt’s opening. She smiles up at the big man who holds his weight on his elbows and knees so he doesn’t crush her.

“Thank you, Ben.”

 _Then_ he’s inside. Then he’s gasping and grunting and fucking with a kind of wild abandon that she’s never felt in him before, not in all the months of her and him. And she’s not in her apartment, and there aren’t dirty clothes on the floor, and the plaster isn’t chipping and the window doesn’t leak when it rains. There’s no rent due and there are no six a.m. alarms.

There’s her. And there’s him.

He savages her. He uses her, in a way that takes her along. When the rest of the world disappears, this thing that they’ve become remains, and she can’t think and can’t speak but it doesn’t matter because neither can he, and they’re spinning away together on a planet without thoughts and without speech. Just with bodies. Just with _this._

Her legs clamp around him but his hips barrel forward still, and her scream is silent and she ceases to be. She’s never cum this hard, she’s _always_ cum this hard, because there is no past or future, only the now of the blinding, devastating peak they sprint to together, and he doesn’t thank her.

And he doesn’t apologize.

He uses the last of his strength, or probably takes out a loan on strength he doesn’t have, to push himself off her before he collapses. She lies there quivering, and just as her eyes start to close she looks over at him.

This is the part when he leaves. He gets dressed and shuts her bedroom doors behind him, quietly, gingerly, so the latch doesn’t make a sound. So he doesn’t steal even a moment more of her sleep.

His face is naked, in the way that his face is naked when he cums. There’s no careful hiding tonight.

“Can I stay?”

_No. My alarm has never woken two bodies before. I’m out of cereal. It’s hot tonight. It will be hotter in the morning. What if we run out of words. You’re too nice for me. Who are you? What have you done? You shouldn’t stay. I shouldn’t want you to stay, Ben. My Ben. You should leave and close the doors. Don’t stay. No._

“Yes.”

Both doors stay open that night.


End file.
